Embodied Agents: A New Impetus to Humor Research

In this paper we survey the role of humor in human-to-human interaction with the aim to see whether it is useful for embodied conversational agents to integrate humor capabilities in their internal model of intelligence, emotions and interaction (verbal and nonverbal) capabilities. For that reason we shortly survey the current state of the art of research in embodied conversational agents, affective computing and verbal and nonverbal interaction. We adhere to the `Computers Are Social Actors' paradigm to assume that human conversational partners of embodied conversational agents assign human properties to these agents, including humor appreciation.